OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan on PBS

In today's Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan makes a case for retaining PBS, but under considerably more oversight than it has labored under for the last thirty years. Her goal: keep Exxon/Mobil Masterpiece Theatre, Mystery, Great Performances, and the like--and I'm sure that she'd love the incomparable British comedic imports like Keeping Up Appearances and As Time Goes By. But eighty-six Now (or should that be Then?) formerly with Bill Moyers, the Charlie Rose show, and so on. I assume that her standard of news reporting would be The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and possibly Washington Week in Review. (Unhappily, Wall $treet Week is worthless now, ever since they unceremoniously threw Louis Rukeyser over the side--but then, who knew that he would throw his back out and walk away from television without so much as an announcement? But I digress.)

Noonan addresses two arguments, and manages to keep them separate:

1. Does PBS have a place on the American television dial, a place that no commercial network can fill?
2. Should someone rein in PBS in order to, for example, tell Bill Moyers that no, he may not tell half the American people that they're nuts?

Unfortunately, Ms. Noonan's case for retaining PBS won't wash. I agree with the critics who say that with 500 channels to choose from, someone will fill the void if PBS disappears. They key is that, although you will no longer see one network to fulfill all of the functions of the current enterprise known as the Public Broadcasting Service, you'll have several, each fulfilling one function, or several. In fact, you already have that. You have at least two channels, Arts and Entertainment and Bravo, to handle the high dramas--and A&E has even run some old PBS offerings and developed new Masterpiece Theatre-style dramas. Bravo, some years ago, ran an excellent original miniseries adapted from Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte-Cristo. A&E's sister channel, History, runs all the historical drama you could want. And while I'm on the subject of historical drama, I have a deep quarrel with the Ken Burns mini-series The Civil War that Noonan cites as good PBS programming--because, being a child of the North and the South, I would like to see a far more balanced perspective on that war than the rah-rah Unionist mega-screed that Ken Burns gave us. But what else do I expect from PBS? They're liberals, and liberals hate the antebellum South and everything it represented--and also impute to the South certain things it did not represent. At least, if I see that sort of thing on History, I'm not paying for its production, as I must on PBS.

But that's not all. Those British comedies could go to TV Land--or to a spin-off of that vintage-show channel devoted to British productions. And they'd be very well-received, and no more pledge breaks that always seem to pre-empt them! (Well, not always--once, in fact, the Keeping Up Appearances cast appeared in a thigh-slapping retrospective and then participated in pledge solicitation--and sounded better than most of the pledge barkers that the PBS channels get these days.) Classic movies already have at least two channels to take them on, if anyone will admit it: American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies.

That leaves but two more PBS functions. One is news. Fine--we have the Fox News Channel. Go ahead, throw the rotten tomatoes; I couldn't care less. Liberal fondness for what passes for news programming on PBS is all of a piece with their despising of Fox News, and for the same reason: when it comes to exposing liberal policy and personal follies, Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill, Kwame Holman, and the rest of them have nothing on Sean Hannity, Brit Hume, and Bill O'Reilly. Furthermore, Hannity has Alan Colmes on board to keep him honest and provide a different perspective--and I'll take Alan Colmes over Bill Moyers any day.

That leaves children's education. Well, sorry, but children's education was never meant to be electronic. The best education is one-on-one, from parent to child. Thus if we never again see a Children's Television Workshop, I for one will not mourn its passing.

Finally, no new-and-improved oversight will wash, either. That will last only until the next Presidential election that Republicans lose. Once that happens--exit PBS oversight; re-enter Fairness Doctrine, with PBS setting the "standard" of what's fair and unfair. And "fair" in the PBS universe means "supportive of what a liberal considers moral"--by the warped standard-of-value of the greatest good for the greatest number, with a little left over for some Big Names with Pull (Russian nomenklatura).

Sorry, Peg, but we can't wimp out here. Dump PBS, and do it now.